My Entertaining Friends

I normally try to post cultural blogs every two months, but I've been a bit out of synch recently. Hence, here's an August one that will allow me to get back on track, meaning the next bulletin will be along at the end of October. Anyway, here's what I've been reading and listening to recently. There's a lot of love round these parts -:

MUSIC:

If you know me, you'd probably imagine that the event I was looking forward to more than any other was Teenage Fanclub at the Fire Station in sunderland. To be honest, I'd had the tickets for so long that it almost crept up on me and when the time came for my 35th  Fannies gig in 35 years, I felt almost underwhelmed, when in the past I'd been in a frenzy for weeks in advance. However, I must say they were excellent, as they always are. It's just the negative noise around the band from people who've taken the hump since Gerry Love left had started to get to me. Such long time TFC devotees as the Moirs and Chris Tate wouldn't be anywhere near this show, which saddens me. I was delighted to see so many people I did know, both in The Dun Cow before, in the very impressive venue itself and even in the car park afterwards. Too many to list, but you know who you are.

Yes, Gerry was (and is) a brilliant songwriter whose departure has deprived the band of so many of their finest numbers. It still feels heartbreaking to know I'll never hear them do “Sparky's Dream” or “Don't Look Back” ever again. That said, when they play live you no longer miss Gerry's numbers because, and I've said this many times before, his departure has allowed Raymond McGinley to blossom and become probably the best songwriter left in the band. Certainly his numbers, such the anthemic “Everything is Falling Apart” have a depth and solemn complexity Gerry's sweet pop ballads never aspired to. It makes seeing them a more compelling experience, rather than a life affirming, celebratory one. Hey, we're all getting older and TFC are maturing like a fine wine.

The current line-up is an awesome unit. Dave is a powerhouse on bass. Francis is the best drummer they've ever had. Even shy Euros is a fully integrated member on the keyboards. Norman is still the grinning showman and held the audience in the palm of his hand all evening. Not an ecstatic crowd, but a good sized, good natured and attentive one, who did lose the run of themselves for both “The Concept” and, obviously, “Everything Flows.” No new songs tonight, but with a back catalog as superb as Teenage Fanclub have, even if a third of it is off limits, that wasn't an issue. Certainly I left the venue with renewed confidence in their future prospects. Still the best fucking band in the world.

Other than The Fannies, I've had the pleasure of attending three other wonderful gigs, performed by people I'm proud to call my friends. On Sunday  August 10, Johnny Brown (voice and harmonica) and Bill Lewington (guitar not drums) played The Cumberland Arms. They were supporting David Lance Callahan, who I'm afraid I didn't stay for, doing a set of Band of Holy Joy classics. Goodness, this was a brilliant show that almost reduced me to tears. Johny is recovering from prostate cancer and Bill had a brain haemorrhage a few years back. To see them both up on the stage was a delight and a privilege. I was touched they dedicated “Wyrd Beautiful Time” to me and almost on the floor when they did “Who Snatched the Baby?” I first saw Johny fronting Speed, at my debut punk gig, in July 1977, just before I turned 13. Since then he's been a musical hero and, for about 30 years now I guess, a personal friend. Love the block. Love Bill as well. It was a magical evening, and I so hope to see them again soon.

My actual birthday saw Richy Hetherington announce a “secret gig” by Loveable Wholes at Little Buildings, supported by the estimable John Egdell, who delivered a set of beautiful vignettes to lost loves and finished off with an instrumental version of “I'm in the Mood for Dancing,” which proved he'd got the Chemistry just right. When Richy told me about the gig, I decided to ask if I could play. Now, after the Blyth Fiasco last year, I'd vowed never to play solo again, but this was in front of a very different audience than that night. Richy not only agreed, but he put me on last. To clarify, I wasn't top of the bill, he just thought I'd be playing football that night and would be down late. The football was off for holidays, so I got the 62 down, armed with a couple of guitars and played 2 pieces not from either of my recent albums. “Alan Carter's Mobility Scooter” involved me tuning my hollow-bodied Hofner to open E and using a violin bow to make some nice, for my standards, sounds. It seemed to go down well, as did the snappily titled “DCRAFPH.” This one has a backing tape of phrases looped and repeated, with me using the Telecaster to make various Em chords and improvisations around that chord. Again it went down well. People said nice things afterwards and I was incredibly touched. I loved the whole experience and then Flan and I got a bit hammered in The Tanners. If anyone wants me as a support act, I'm more than willing to play anywhere at any time.

To be serious now, Richy and Hope as The Loveable Wholes are the most heartbreakingly beautiful of bands on the go at the minute. Born out of a tragic loss, Richy has channeled his grievance into songs that make you want to hug him and never let go. They were doing this gig as a warm up for a show in Canada, which was part of their holiday, and it was even more wonderful than the time I'd seen them almost a year earlier at The Globe. Richy has a few copies of his cassette, The Cloth Work Sessions, available on Bandcamp via Katpis Tapes. Get one. You'll not hear more emotional songs than “The Blackest Hole” or “Holocene” anywhere else. I love that block.

I love Paul Flanagan too. I've known Flan for 39 years now and, in all that time, despite being a bassist rather than a musician, he has been in some of the best local bands around. Puppy Fat, 35 years ago now, were just the best fun in town. Nancy Bone was, perhaps, more of an acquired taste, though I did love their cover version of “The Floral Dance.” I only saw Emergency Librarian 2 ounce, at Cobalt Studios, but felt dismayed when they split up. His latest project, Lava Mouse, had eluded me until now. The played the Victoria Tunnel a while back, but my claustrophobia precludes me watching anything there, which is why I had to miss Chris Bartholomew the other week as well. I was elected Lava Mouse were playing at Laurels in Whitley on Saturday 23 August, although to see then, I had to let down another old pal, my ex-colleague Steven Driver, who was playing Baba Yaga's Hut in Shields the same night. Sorry Steven. Next time I promise.

Anyway, arriving in Whitley, I wasn't sure what to expect. I'd never been to Laurels before, and it appears to be a coastal Lubber Fiend without the exorbitant drinks' prices. First we were Drooping Finger, but I didn't get to see them. The room was full, and someone shut the door so I couldn't get in. As it was an immersive experience, I felt it would be wrong to comment on sound only. Incidentally, it was a green door as well, so Frankie Vaughan and Shakin' Stevens would have empathized.

I got a front row seat for the next act; Dressed in Wires playing their first gig in a decade. Theremin, keyboards, backing tapes, visuals (which I couldn't see properly but looked like they were based on Protect & Survive ) made for loud, raucous fun. A tremendous show, ending with the first example I've never seen of air keyboard playing. Top of the bill at this free gig, were Lava Mouse. And I adored them. From a slowly evolving percussive start, to the symbolic shredding of copies of the Daily Mail, this “Mushroom Ritual,” a concept I don't claim to understand was beguiling, intense fun. Real drums. Really fucking brutal metal percussion. A couple of squiggly soundboxes providing tinnitus for the masses. I loved it. A great night on the pop as well. And I got the Metro home at 12.10, saving loads on an Uber. This was a special night, and I think I'd make an ideal support act for them.

I had £4.01 left on a Record Token someone gave me for my birthday last year. The only place I knew that took them in town, now Windows is no more, is RPM. Leafing through the cheap section I found a copy of Retrospective by Buffalo Springfield. I'd long needed a version of “For What It's Worth,” so I bought it, pocketed the 2p change and enjoyed it back home. Obviously, the Neil Young tracks are the standout items; “I am a Child” and “Mr Soul” in particular. This is one I'll listen to again, skipping some of the dated country rock that makes up the rest of this 1969 release.

BOOKS:

Of late I've been availing myself more and more of community libraries, in Heaton, Jesmond Vale and Tynemouth in particular. These fabulous organic schemes are set up by interested readers who, instead of buying yet more books (and I'll always be an inveterate bibliophile who has an all-consuming need to get certain authors' new titles as soon as they are published), recycle tomes they no longer want. The basic idea is you exchange a book for another. Obviously there are hundreds of John Grisham and Marian Keyes titles to wade through when looking for something good, but I've managed to find a few autobiographies that spiked my interest.

The unifying principle of Leading from the Front by Mike Gatting, Our Story by Reg and Ronnie Kray, co-written with Fred Dineage bizarrely enough, and White Line Fever by Lemmy, apart from the fact they are appallingly ghostwritten, is that the alleged writers have absolutely no self-awareness. Gatting's is a particularly tough read, combining detailed statistical records from his playing days, together with a kind of bull-headed ignorance of the significance of his conduct in the context of the wider world. His infamous confrontation with Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana is brushed over, reduced to the level of a minor disagreement in the heat of the moment, rather than the major diplomatic incident it became. He tells of players going on South African tours under apartheid as if they were club cricketers enjoying a sunny winter sinecure playing abroad. It was written before he took the filthy lucre on offer for going on a rebel tour, which presumably he simply saw as a decent payday, rather than a breach of the Gleneagles Agreement. Slob.

I read the Kray Twins' book with a sense of depressed foreboding about what would be inside. Predictably it involves lots of stories of gangland violence, justified by their sense of being East End boys who loved their mother and looked after their own. Obviously, they're both dead now and no great loss. Sadly, Steve Wraith doesn't get a mention. Dineage hardly appears, which means if I ever met him I'd inquire what his role in the project was by uttering a single word. How?

Lemmy's also dead and his story of sex and drugs and rock and roll explains why. The book is the product of an addled mind, scrambled by profuse drinking and substance abuse. There's no insight into the creative processes or tensions within the band, specifically the departures of Fast Eddie or Philthy Animal. The Hawkwind era is the best bit but, unsurprisingly, memories of that band in the early 70s are sketchy at best. I am pleased I didn't pay a penny piece for these books.

I did lash out £25 the 2025-2026 Utilita Football Yearbook . Formerly Rothman's, it's the 57th edition  of the absolute, definitive bible of football stats and will be on my bedside table for reference purposes for the next 11 months. I also dropped out £20 on You and Me Against the World by Saskia Holling, which describes itself as telling the story of “two women, five bands and the Edinburgh indie scene in the mid-1980s.” It does what it says on the cover but, in a field crowded with books on a similar theme, such as Grant McPhee and Douglas MacIntyre's brilliant, encyclopaedic Hungry Beat , which is the true history of Scottish post-punk, I wonder whether Holling has stretched a piece of long form journalism a little too far. Basically, the book is about The Shop Assistants, The Motorcycle Boy, Rote Kapelle, Jesse Garon and The Desperadoes and The Vultures, who I'd never heard of. What it should have been about is Alex Taylor, the beautiful and brilliant singer whose voice made “Safety Net ” by The Shop Assistants possibly the best C86 song (apart from possibly “Therese” by The Bodines). This perfect slab of sweet Velvets-influenced indie pop, with attendant pounding bass and uplifting guitar, was sadly the beginning of the end for The Shop Assistants. They signed to a major. Bombed. Split up. Alex resurfaced with the former members of Meat Whiplash as The Motorcycle Boy, releasing one of the singles of 1987, “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Again record company indifference and regular line-up changes bedeviled this band, who split up, to little fanfare in October 1990. After this, Alex Taylor became elusive. She moved back home to Perth. Got married. Stopped being in touch with her old bandmates and wasn't heard of this side of the millennium. In 2020 it emerged she'd died in 2005, aged 42, of acute alcoholic pancreatitis. A tragic story and one where only the salient details are known. This book should have been about her, but I presume so much of her life remained unrecorded in every sense, it wasn't possible. It's great the other bands, such as the angular Rote Kapelle and the jangling jolties of Jesse Garon are remembered here, but I think I'll head on to reading Creeping Bent alumni Katy Lironi's memoir's Matilda in the Middle next.

Strangely the only novel I've read is The Statement by Brian Moore, which I picked up for £3 in Inverness back in July. Back at university I'd read his classic, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne , but nothing else sense. The Statement is an absolute cracker. A real policeman in the Gallic tradition, he follows twin arms of French society, the Government and the Police, attempting to catch up with an unapologetic Vichy War Criminal, who has been harbored by the Church since the end of World War 2, but is now wanted for war crimes for the summary execution of 14 Jewish men in 1944. He gets his comeuppance in the end, but it's the baddest of the baddies who catches up with him not the Gendarmerie. An absolutely compelling page-turner and one of my favorite reads of the year thus far.